11 May Key Learnings From Working With Managed Services During A Crisis

Our National Sales Director Kyle Hanagarne was joined by Customer Success Manager Adrain Vogt and Manager, Seniors Card & Business Services at SA Health’s Office for Ageing Well Evlynn Hayes to discuss how to stabilise and scale operations in a new world with Managed Services. And while you can rewatch their whole discussion, we’re sharing their best pieces of advice right here.

Learnings from SA Health’s Office for Ageing Well

Manager, Seniors Card & Business Services at SA Health’s Office for Ageing Well Evlynn Hayes is currently leading her team through their most important work. Since COVID-19 started the Seniors Card team realised they had a major role to play in keeping their customers informed. With an online audience of over 90,000, they turned to Simplus CRM Managed Services to help them respond at record speed. These are her top lessons from working with her team and Managed Services during a crisis.

#1. Find someone who understands your business

The best piece of advice I can give is to look for someone who takes the time to understand your business. You want a managed service provider who can do that big picture thinking, make recommendations and guide you in the right direction to help scale your business.

#2. Make sure you have the right support so you can support your customers

Being able to respond to your customers when they need you the most is vital for any business – not just public service providers. Without Simplus’s CRM Managed Services, we wouldn’t have been able to respond as quickly to the current climate and ensure relevant information reached our customers in a timely manner.

#3. Now is the time to implement your digital technology plans

To help relieve the impact on our internal resources during this period of increased demand, we’ve started progressing our member self-service project earlier than planned so members can manage their subscription and update their details.

#4. Think of CRM Managed Services as an extension of your team

Before COVID-19, I was already working closely with the Managed Services team – I’ve been a Zoom expert well before this year! Having that well-established relationship in place meant Simplus understood our business and customer needs straight away. When responding to a crisis ,you don’t want to lose time in briefing your suppliers; you want them to react as if they were an internal member of your team.

Advice from Simplus’s Customer Success Manager

As someone who works with customers from all walks of life and industries, Adrain Vogt knows what works and what doesn’t when it comes to digital transformations and solutions. Here are his top three pieces of advice for businesses looking to engage a CRM Managed Services provider.

#1. Embrace remote service

Recently we’ve seen a trend in organisations being more open to engaging remote services. While that sounds strange given a large amount of the Australian workforce is currently operating remotely, not all organisations are comfortable working with a remote service provider. Now, organisations understand that location doesn’t impact on exceptional service.

#2. A small amount of expertise can go a long way

In this challenging environment, having someone on-call to support your Admin or an expert providing innovative ideas makes all the difference. Even if it’s only five to 10 hours a week of targeted assistance, that expertise can help you establish or improve your Salesforce operation.

#3. Don’t just keep the lights on

It’s essential to keep your digital solutions stable during this pandemic, but don’t just focus on keeping your instance operational. You want to keep innovating so when this is all over you’re in the best position to scale.

Simplus’s Kyle Hanagarne’s two most important tips

As the National Sales Director of Simplus ANZ, Kyle has plenty of advice to share. He shared two essential things that all businesses should think about now and for the future.

#1. Always check your provider’s data security

Since the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in May 2018, the processing and security of personal data have been top of mind of businesses and customers. Ensure your Managed Services provider is transparent about their data handling protocols and have established best practices.

#2. Have a plan in place to support you during any type of crisis

While COVID-19 is creating uncertainty for businesses right now, businesses should plan and prepare for any future disruptions. It is likely another incident will occur where you have a spike in need or need to continue innovating on your Salesforce platform. Take learnings from today’s crisis and put a plan in place to ensure you can scale your operations and remain stable during any type of crisis.

Rewatch the discussion and learn how CRM Managed Services can help your stabilise and scale in this new world.

Follow Simplus Australia on LinkedIn to get the latest industry news, Salesforce updates, and topics that matter to you and your organisation.